William Alderwick: What is the Technocene?
Nadim Samman: One of the fundamental insights that I'm building upon is Benjamin Bratton's comment that we always already find ourselves within within planetary computation. And that means that there's no outside to the technical edifice itself; from the pipes beneath our feet to the satellites in the sky, and the Wi-Fi signals unseen in the air. We're in the middle of it.
You would imagine that you could go to the countryside and escape the city. But it's not like that. It's subject to remote viewing systems, arrays of sensors and surveillance. Ultimately, there is no outside, and what that implies is that everything within the technosphere stands to be datafied.
Anything that becomes data can be disassembled, and its units recombined into infinite possible hybrids. You can take some data from one thing and some data from another, and you can create a third thing, and another, and another…
Everything that can be datafied can be put to work in alienation from itself. What this means is that space feels different and so does time. And by time I also mean history.
Even the experience of what constitutes the past, or what death might mean, is radically up in the air. You can train an AI on the data trail left behind by a person in their life, and then that data trail can help you to create an AI simulacrum of them.
William Alderwick: Like the Tu-Pac hologram.
Nadim Samman: Yes. So you’ve got a fundamental unsettling of the notion of what the past is in relation to the present, and also in relation to the future. It's just a much more fluid relation than in previous eras. Things that would seem to be dead are actually much more undead now. They walk among us in ways that perhaps are much more palpable.
Our relation to history is different. Our relation to death is different. Actually, our relationship to finality in general. Because, if you imagine the past—Isn’t it is supposed to have definitively ‘happened’? It's not happen-ing, after all. This should be a really basic intuition. What has happened is in the past tense, right? In the rearview mirror. But now things are not so clear. Every ‘happened’ is provisional. It can be reworked. Even memory itself. The archive can be put to work and reimagined in post-truth moments. Perhaps this was always the case, but now the reworking happens so fast that post-factum appears positively animated.
William Alderwick: One of the standout artworks that you discuss in the book is by Nora Al-Badri. She uses AI to create an archive of fictional historical artifacts; items that might have existed once but been destroyed for a civilization that was colonized or experienced cultural destruction.
Nadim Samman: Our relationship to heritage, to our past, to the things which constitute the tokens of our history as a culture, or as a community… that past is potentially reanimated in an undead form through generative AI. And there are a lot of claims for whether or not it is undead or, rather, newly living.
William Alderwick: What's interesting about that piece is that it is inherently a destabilizing process, that embraces the sense of ungrounding you talk about. There's something questionable here in the work in terms of how it undermines the possibility of truth, post-truth, verification.
Nadim Samman: Exactly.
William Alderwick: Do we give ourselves over to an infinite, virtual space of possible nows, possible pasts, everything ungrounded and undead as you say? Or do we need a ‘real’ history?
Nadim Samman: What I said in the book is that the Technocene is punctuated by anachronism. Chronology is scrambled. That's the defining feature of this period. And maybe that's the reason why there seems to be so much concern for ‘being in the now’ in popular culture.
The now has absorbed the past and the future in a way that can be pitched as liberating, in the sort of general rhetoric of ‘being present in the moment’, but also speaks about the collapse of what constitutes the past and its finality.
But don’t forget. The future is disappearing too. Being in the now is also a way to deal with this bereavement as well. It's a quasi-Buddhist approach to the discourse of climate collapse. What I want to say is that the disappearing past and the vanishing future are related. How? Through a Generative AI dream of infinite abundance, powered by a GPU arms race that cannot imagine burning anything less than all the energy available.
William Alderwick: Like Thomas Moynihan’s X-Risk, a history of the idea of extinction, which tells the story of the horizon of our understanding of our collective finality.
Nadim Samman: You can look at it in terms of the apocalyptic dimensions of climate change. But what's interesting is how it tracks onto the cultural experience of digitality. What the Internet and AI does to the historical archive. What it does to our experience of where we are in time.
William Alderwick: Eva and Franco Mattes’ Panorama Cat has been a signature image around the show, in reviews and interviews. As an image, I find it unremarkable. But perhaps that un-remarkability is what is remarkable about it?
Nadim Samman: Totally. Remember, everybody likes cats. When we first had viral images on social media, it was always cats, cat videos, cat this, cat that, and the Panorama Cat is based on a viral image. Cats are domestic animals, gods of the home. But the Panoramic Cat is like a sphinx. It's a contemporary sphinx that announces the threshold before total datafication, or at the very least, the event horizon of the black hole that is total datafication. For me, it's a clear illustration of the kind of monstrosity that emerges when things digitize and how that process distorts the reality of the thing. So the cat goes from having four legs to eight. That's a clear illustration. But it's indicative, in its simplicity, of multiple complex forms that can emerge—the more ineffable chimera that are part of the same family. It's like Q of QAnon. It's a composite figure. Chimerical.
The Panorama Cat has value because you can use it as clear illustration of a principle that may be involved in much more nebulous phenomena. I make an argument for it as a way to imagine or visualize a meme. What's a meme? It's not a meme, it's many memes. Consider the Wojack meme. Can you point to any one Wojack that is the meme? No, it's a host of images. And together they add up to the meme. It's naturally chimerical because it's made up of many, many, beings. It's the many in the one. Panorama Cat is a tutelary image for the relationship between the one and the many in digital culture.
William Alderwick: In the sense that it's an image of something uncanny that is not itself uncanny, is it kitsch?
Nadim Samman: Well, yeah, but that's cats in general, you know? Cats are like domestic gods, they're of the home. But they are not quite ever yours, somehow. They're the familiar face of the alien; like, fluffy aliens. I think that's why it's always a cat. Because in the end, it’s about domesticating the feral, and it's about the presence of some element of the absolute other in the domestic space.